The Age of Innocence eBook

Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before
him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw
the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was
ever to happen. He glanced about him at the
unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-grove
under which the dusk was gathering. It had seemed
so exactly the place in which he ought to have found
Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the
pink sunshade was not hers . . .

He frowned and hesitated. “You don’t
know, I suppose—­ I shall be in Boston tomorrow.
If I could manage to see her—­”

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him,
though her smile persisted. “Oh, of course;
how lovely of you! She’s staying at the
Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather.”

After that Archer was but intermittently aware of
the remarks they exchanged. He could only remember
stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should await
the returning family and have high tea with them before
he drove home. At length, with his hostess still
at his side, he passed out of range of the wooden
Cupid, unfastened his horses and drove off.
At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing
at the gate and waving the pink parasol.

XXIII.

The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall
River train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer
Boston. The streets near the station were full
of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit
and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with
the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage
to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club
for breakfast. Even the fashionable quarters
had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excess
of heat ever degrades the European cities. Care-takers
in calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy,
and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the
morrow of a Masonic picnic. If Archer had tried
to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could
not have called up any into which it was more difficult
to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted
Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning
with a slice of melon, and studying a morning paper
while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs.
A new sense of energy and activity had possessed
him ever since he had announced to May the night before
that he had business in Boston, and should take the
Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the
following evening. It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week, and
when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth
a letter from the office, which fate had conspicuously
placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to
justify his sudden change of plan. He was even
ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had
been done: it reminded him, for an uncomfortable
moment, of Lawrence Lefferts’s masterly contrivances
for securing his freedom. But this did not long
trouble him, for he was not in an analytic mood.